With the proliferation of connections to the Internet by a rapidly growing number of users, the viability of the Internet as a widely accepted medium of communication has increased correspondingly. Internet technology is changing rapidly to cope with ever increasing demands, and the faster the technology changes, the more services users expect from the Internet. For example, users were once satisfied with text and still images on their Web pages, but now they demand video to be delivered quickly and to be presented with a high degree of quality.
Video is often delivered over the Internet in the form of streaming video, although there are other ways to deliver video. With streaming video, lectures or seminars can be broadcast, announcements can be made, or demonstrations on how to do something can be delivered to users. Streaming video allows users to view video over the Internet as the video is being downloaded instead of waiting until the entire file is downloaded. After the user's machine spends a few seconds buffering a portion of the downloaded streaming video, the machine is able to begin playing the video using a video player installed on the machine. Some of the most popular streaming video players currently being used include Windows Media Player®, Apple Quicktime® and RealVideo®. Streaming video has become so common that most client machines, such as personal computers, have one or more streaming video players already installed when purchased from a retailer.
While streaming video has enriched the online experience, users often find accessing the video to be difficult. When a user finds some video content they would like to download from a Website, the user must provide information about their machine's operating environment to the Website. The Website needs this information so it can provide the correct version of the video based on the particular video player installed on the user's machine, the video player's version, the particular operating system installed on the user's machine, the operating system's version, and what network bandwidth speed the user's machine is connected at.
The most common way for a Website to obtain this information is to ask the user a series of questions or provide several drop down menus. However, this requires the users to have some knowledge of their machine's operating environment. Users savvy enough to be able to provide their machine's environment information find this process tedious and cumbersome. Some users may not bother with providing the Website with the information needed to determine the correct version of the video to send. Other users who are not familiar with their machine's environment information will simply give up trying to download the video rather than spend time trying to obtain this information. Aside from depriving the user from viewing the video, there may be other less obvious but far reaching consequences. For instance, the video may contain advertisements in which case the advertisers lose potential sales.